Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Nintendo has some taken existing GameCube games, that show the potential for Wii like controls and released them as "New Play Control" games - by tweaking their controller interface mapping to use the Wii controls instead.

For the most part, this involves changing the control scheme mappings, but could involve some further tweaks that change the original control scheme significantly to make it familiar with Wii users - clearly a larger user base than the original GameCube one.

I am excited that Nintendo has innovated on this idea, and the only thing fans will complain about is more GC games to be reincarnated on the Wii - especially games like Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker, Super Mario Sunshine, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, The original Metroid Prime + Prime 2: Echoes and Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II.

Its interesting - the Wii now has along with standalone Wii games -
* WiiWare - smaller games available as downloads
* Classic games - from older Nintendo consoles
* And now "New Play Control" games

Just more games to feed your Wii appetite. But Nintendo has yet to implement my Wii wishlist -

* Better graphics and hardware with 1080p support (via HDMI)
* A better classic controller that is more Xbox 360 and PS3 like - some games can take advantage of dual control schemes
* Wireless nunchuck
* Better, ergonomically designed Wiimotes
* Motivated marketing folks to attract more 3rd party game developers!!

Giant Robo (ジャイアントロボ Jaianto Robo?), is a manga and tokusatsu series created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama. It is similar to his famous Tetsujin 28-go (Gigantor in the US), only Giant Robo has more fantastic elements.The original tokusatsu TV series, produced by Toei Company Ltd., aired on NET (now TV Asahi) from October 11, 1967 to April 1, 1968, with a total of 26 episodes. The English dubbed version of the series was produced by American International Television as Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot. [more on Wikipedia]

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Gamasutra.com secured an interview with David Shippy who was the chief architect of the power processing unit for the Cell (the engine that drives the PS3). The chip began the research and design process in 2000 when Sony asked IBM for an "order of magnitude increase in processing performance." Ironically it was that very ambition and the design that followed that would one day be the foundation for Microsoft's Xbox 360.

When asked the flame war inducing question, "which console is actually more powerful?"

Shippy tells Gamasutra,

"I'm going to have to answer with an 'it depends.' Again, they're completely different models. So in the PS3, you've got this Cell chip which has massive parallel processing power, the PowerPC core, multiple SPU cores… it's got a GPU that is, in the model here, processing more in the Cell chip and less in the GPU. So that's one processing paradigm -- a heterogeneous paradigm."

"With the Xbox 360, you've got more of a traditional multi-core system, and you've got three PowerPC cores, each of them having dual threads -- so you've got six threads running there, at least in the CPU. Six threads in Xbox 360, and eight or nine threads in the PS3 -- but then you've got to factor in the GPU," Shippy explains. "The GPU is highly sophisticated in the Xbox 360."

"At the end of the day, when you put them all together, depending on the software, I think they're pretty equal."